Why Big Tech may NOT end up dominating Generative AI

Despite the huge firepower of the world’s fourth largest company by market capitalization (after Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia), Google’s presentation on Wednesday attracted less media attention than OpenAI’s the day before, which may well have been arranged strategically to overshadow it.

Google will integrate Gemini 1.5 Pro into all its tools — the least we could expect — and its Project Astra combines voice and camera in a way that makes it multimodal, i.e. you can talk to it, show it things, etc., but in the collective imagination, it’s just what Google showed the world after OpenAI had already shown it to them the day before. Obviously, Google can take advantage of its huge user base, but in many ways it is still the company that having already developed generative AI, but not wanting to cannibalize its other products, refused to bring it to market until OpenAI forced its hand. That’s what happens: you try to avoid cannibalization, but the competition ends up taking a bite out of you.

Bearing in mind the competition between these two giants, and not forgetting Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, etc., all locked in a race to offer us more and more features and use cases, what can we expect in the coming years? Right now, not only Big Tech, but virtually every company worth its salt in every industry, is applying generative AI to…